In Brooklyn, New York, where space is precious, it's not surprising that many of the borough's residents are starting to complain, loudly, about the countless used-clothing donation bins gobbling up sidewalks and serving as a magnet for garbage and graffiti. Aghast, Brooklyn Magazine commanded its readers not to use "those piece-of-crap bins."

The proliferating bins are owned by Viltex, a Newark-based, for-profit textile recycling company—one that's violating a city ordinance by blocking the sidewalks. Even more rankling, the pastel-colored bins are operating under the guise of charity, their sides often stamped with magnanimous slogans.

What does it mean for textiles to get recycled? While almost half of donated clothing gets worn again, a large portion of it is recycled in the traditional sense—ground down and re-formed into things like insulation and carpet padding—and a slightly smaller portion is turned into industrial rags.

Figuring out the proper way to dispose of old clothes can be perplexing; if these bins were to be taken off the sidewalks, few people would know where to put their used clothing. On top of that, Americans still think of old clothes as charitable donations, which explains the outrage over news that the Viltex bins actually belong to a for-profit company.

Those in the textile-recycling industry are now trying to clear up the confusion. "What we need to do is change the dialogue to, 'You're not just donating, you're reusing and recycling,'" says Jackie King, executive director of the Secondhand Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a trade group. "It's an issue of communicating that and getting people to understand that if they want to use a charitable organization to reuse or recycle clothing, great. If not, let's make it convenient for people to dispose of it elsewhere."

Most recycling, from bottles to cans to newspapers, is done by for-profit companies. In a nation that churns out an ungodly amount of waste, this amounts to big business. Take plastic: The U.S. exported more than $940 million worth of plastic scrap in 2010. The value of used clothing, moreover, has been in its own inflationary bubble since the recession, as more people are cash-strapped and opting to buy used.

Most of our used clothing ends up in the hands of for-profit textile recyclers anyway.

Of course, castoff clothing differs from a bottle or a newspaper in that almost half of it can be reused as secondhand clothing; it needn't be ground down into a pulp to make a new product, as is the case with plastic or glass. But the other half—the ripped, the torn, the busted—is recyclable.

Charities have been our de facto national textile recyclers going back to the early 20th century, and Goodwill started providing bins for clothing donations as early as the 1940s. But this system was set up in a pre-consumerist America, when we had neither a landfill crunch nor a waste crisis: Americans now buy five times as much clothing as they did in 1980, according to Mattias Wallander, CEO of USAgain, a textile-recycling company. And between 1999 and 2009, the volume of textile trash rose by 40 percent. Particularly due to the advent of cheap, disposable clothing, charities have seen themselves transformed into dumps that accept clothes of varying condition in ever-increasing volumes.

King says there is quite a lot of public misinformation about what exactly happens to clothing when it’s donated to charities. "People think when they are giving to, say, a Salvation Army or Goodwill, that all of that is going to be resold in their stores, and it's just not, because they don't have enough room for that," she says. In fact, according to King, there's only a 15 or 20 percent chance that a piece of clothing you've donated is being worn by someone in your community, as charities receive far too many donations to sell them all.

Instead, charities such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army sell only what they can in their retail shops—typically less than 20 percent of what they receive. From there, they call for-profit textile recycling companies, like Viltex, who then buy up the leftover clothes by the pound and recycle them.

If most of our used clothing ends up in the hands of for-profit textile recyclers anyway, how do we get the public more comfortable with the idea of donating to them to begin with? One way is to convince municipalities such as New York City to take textile recycling more seriously, and to make used-clothing drop-off and recycling options more widespread. Kathryn Garcia, who took office as New York City’s sanitation commissioner in April,* says her staff is focusing on greatly expanding New York's re-fashioNYC program, which places textile recycling bins in apartment buildings with more than 10 units and collects clothing on the weekends at several markets.

Other cities have taken a far more assertive approach, collecting textiles curbside with other recyclables. Queen Creek, Arizona, collects towels, clothing, blankets, sheets and shoes in special waterproof bags. Other cities have designed new fleets of garbage trucks with separate compartments for clothes. New York City has no such plans for curbside textile recycling, Garcia says; a curbside program would require creating a new route for just six percent of the waste stream, and on top of that, textiles can’t be left out in the rain like bottles can.

Companies and other organizations have attempted their own solutions, too. Packmee, a program in Germany and the Netherlands, allows citizens to ship their old clothes for free to textile recyclers. Meanwhile, in the UK and Canada, schools have become the central place for textile collection, making it easy for parents to drop off last season’s has-beens along with their kids. In the U.S., retailers including Patagonia, H&M, The North Face, and Eileen Fisher have implemented in-store recycling and take-back programs. This patchwork approach might be the solution to capturing more of America's unwanted clothes, for now.

In a place like New York City, where depositing clothing might mean getting on the subway with a heavy bag of last year's faux-leather leggings and crop tops, it's enticing to just throw old clothes away. Or to just plunk them into your local mystery clothing bin that says it's charitable, when it's not. After some decades of recycling, though, one thing we've learned is that people won’t do it if it isn’t convenient.

* This post originally stated that New York City's sanitation commissioner is named Nancy Garcia, and that she took office in March. We regret the error.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.